Sh%$ Storm at a Sh%$ty Paper, Part 1

This portion is about the New York Times and its functioning, and not the underlying story.

The underlying story, was the December 2023 story recounting reports of sexual violence during Hamas' October attacks on communities bordering Gaza.

It appears that there has been a lot of discussion and disputes internal to the paper as to whether the story was sell sourced, whether there was an over-reliance on 2 stringers in Israel, whether, the accounts were properly sourced, and whether the editors ordered a specific outcome to the story.

It should be noted here, and I cannot find a link right now, that the culture at the Times is different from most other major metropolitan papers, and not just because so many of their reporters are Ivy League Trustafarians.

I have read on a number of occasions, unfortunately I cannot find links, that editors at the Gray Lady will frequently dispatch reporters not just with instructions to get the story, but frequently with what should be the narrative if they do not find something unexpected.

This happens at all newspapers, but at the Times, it far more common, and it is not necessarily journalistically unethical if not pushed too far.

As near as I can figure out, someone, almost certainly some of the staff at the NYT podcast, "The Daily," leaked documents, along with poo flinging on internal discussion boards (Discord?) to the online news organization The Intercept. 

Rather ironically, the New York Times appears to have launched a rather aggressive internal leak investigation, because leaks should go to them, and go from them, and there are allegations that they are targeting employees of Arab ethnicity or Islamic religion.

It is clear that there is a problem at the New York Times, and have been for years.

There is a reason that Atrios refers to it as, "That f%$#ing newspaper."

A lot of this appears to stem from the organization of "The Daily" podcast which functions largely independently of the regular news organization.

I think that the reporting of this on Weekend Edition Sunday with Ayesha Rascoe and David Folkenflik provides the description of the inside baseball sh%$ going on, along with being far more concise: The Intercept focuses more on the underlying story, which in the grand scheme of things is more important, but I'm discussing that in part 2.

Again, if you are looking into a window to the culture of the New York Times, I think that (for once) NPR has a good and concise rundown of what is going on: 

………
Rascoe:	Tell us about the story at the root of this conflict.
Folkenflik:	Sure. Conflict being the right word here - kind of mirroring what we've seen outside The Times. The December 28 story was called "Screams Without Words," and it said that New York Times had documented a pattern of sexual assault by Hamas on October 7 as a brutal strategy. It kind of goes without saying, but this all matters because The Times' influence not only affects coverage here in the U.S. but also, I'd say, the political climate in Israel and beyond. The piece carried the lead byline of Jeffrey Gettleman, as well as two freelancers. Critics argued the anecdotes weren't fully nailed down. In one case, for example, a couple of relatives raised questions about whether or not a sexual assault had happened to the woman who was killed. One of the lead writers was a freelancer, the Israeli documentary-maker Anat Schwartz. She turned out to have liked a bunch of posts on the social media platform X after the attacks, one of which called for Gaza to be leveled by bulldozers.
Rascoe:	So how did The New York Times respond to those questions?
Folkenflik:	Well, Ayesha, let's take the last one. First, The Times said that those social media likes, those activities by Schwartz, were absolutely unacceptable. But I've got to say - at the moment, not 100% clear whether that disqualifies her from future reporting - The Times saying it's not talking about personnel decisions. The paper did say then - and it is saying now - that it has done additional reporting and that its reports remain solid. That same reporting team did a follow-up late last month acknowledging the criticism, offering what it said was more bolstering details. But I wouldn't say that that's fully satisfied critics at, for example, The Intercept or in other outlets.
Rascoe:	So why doesn't it resolve the issue?
Folkenflik:	Well, from those reports and from my reporting in the last 48 hours, it looks as though that story was to serve as the heart of an episode at "The Daily," The Times', you know, hit news podcast. Staffers on that show raised a lot of questions about the solidity of the reporting, really pressing reporters - Jeffrey Gettleman, among others. And something of a standoff seems to have emerged. When all of this appeared in The Intercept, editors that - at The New York Times started an inquiry, something they confirmed publicly last night.  ……… Well, I'd say it's actually - it's extraordinary to know the inner workings of The Times, but the idea that they have a leak investigation - you've got to remember, The Times relies on leaks from people in government, corporate life and other sectors of American society to feed and fuel their own reporting, particularly their investigative reporting. Leaks are things that, you know, major institutions don't want to become public, right?  ……… But in a memo last night, the top editor of The Times - that's Joe Kahn - and his deputies, Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan - said, yes, it's extraordinary because the circumstances are extraordinary. They say internal working documents from "The Daily" were shared with these outside source at The Intercept, not just their disagreements, and that they have sought to work in their time to open up greater lines of communications with staffers and give them more opportunity to lodge questions and concerns. For these to be shared outside the papers inhibits those conversations. Meanwhile, I will say the union denies the material was shared. They claim just the dissent. ……… There's two culture clashes here, I'll end with. One is the audio versus print. They're almost different newsrooms, and audio has felt burned by investigations in the past. They want to be tight. The other is the climate change, I think, since the George Floyd social justice movement. It means people speak up and take issues in ways we haven't seen in decades. And The Times doesn't have a handle on that clash.

(emphasis mine)

So, at it's core a lot of this is that the podcast side does not believe in the quality of the reporting from the print side, and the print side does not trust the podcast side.

It's a toxic mix of disdain, self-importance, and score settling.

I have been told that the Washington Post is not all that different from this, though I heard that in 1982, so things might have changed. (But probably not)

I still think that part of the problem is that people who are practicing the trade of journalism have been trained over the past few decades that they are a profession, and as such, they put on airs, engage in ferocious backbiting and conflict over nothing.